The Five Numbers That Matter

1. Order-Level Net Payout, Not Sales

"Sales" on the dashboard is gross order value. Your business runs on net payout after deductions.

Track both; the ratio between them is your true deduction rate, and it should not drift upward unnoticed.

2. Rating Trend, Weekly

A 0.2 drop moves you down in ranking and costs orders for weeks.

Read every review below 4 stars; if the same complaint appears twice, it's an operations defect with a name.

3. Kitchen Preparation Time vs Promise

Consistently breaching promised prep time triggers ranking penalties and cancellations.

If you can't hit 20 minutes in rush hour, promise 30 — honesty ranks better than optimism.

4. Cancellation & Rejection Rate

Every rejection (item unavailable, kitchen overloaded) is penalised.

If items go out of stock daily, your dashboard problem is actually an inventory problem — fix stock visibility at the counter.

5. Menu-Item Performance

Both apps show orders per item. Cross this with your own dish costs and you have the online menu-engineering matrix: push what's profitable and popular, fix or delist what isn't.

The dashboard alone can't do this — it doesn't know your costs.

Metrics to Stop Staring At

  • Impressions and menu visits: they rise with ad spend by design — they justify the next ad pitch, not your P&L.
  • City-rank gamification: you can't manage what you can't decompose.
  • Gross sales alone: the number that goes up while profit goes down, if discounts and ads are doing the lifting.

The 20-Minute Weekly Routine

  1. Same day each week: note net payout, deduction rate, rating, prep-time breach %, cancellation % for each platform in one sheet (or let your POS do it).
  2. Read every sub-4-star review; assign one fix with an owner and a date.
  3. Check top-10 and bottom-10 menu items; decide one menu action — a price change, a photo change, or a delisting.
  4. Compare aggregator net revenue to counter revenue for the same week — the mix tells you where to invest attention next.

Make This Automatic

When your POS records every aggregator order with its commission at order time, dashboard monitoring stops being an investigation and becomes a report you glance at.

See how F&Bos tracks aggregator orders →